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An in-depth study on E-mail E-mail is one of the most popular and used ICT facility. Electronic Mail provides quick exchange of complex informations: documents, presentations, images, graphs, etc. However E-Mail has inherited some problems connected with the context in which it was born. The basic protocols of e-mail were coded when the worldwide spread of the internet was not still expectable. Therefore e-mail basic instruments do not offer many guarantees for emergency and reliability: we can say that it all depends on the confidence in users' trust.&lt;img hspace="0" src="/files/0507200511.40.20-schema-posta.7dvd" align="middle" border="1" />An example: using a normal e-mail system (as you can still find in Internet) anyone can send a mail message pretending to use any account, with any name (being imaginary or belonging to another person). When we receive an e-mail message, usually we trust the name of the senser that appears in the &quot;from&quot; field; this &quot;trust habit&quot; is normally considered sufficient even for non-important informations. However for important documents this seems effectively much hazardous. Other problems from which standard e-mails are suffering are, for instance: the risk to transmit viruses or to receive undesired mail, the risk that someone can read or alter the correspondence, the risk of loss of messages. Probably the adoption of particular precautions or checking tools is not required when the use of e-mail is limited to non-important exchange of informations. Yet in the other cases it can be convenient to have a picture of what the market offers, in order to check the exposed risks. Various types of solutions exist for each type of risk: from &quot;light&quot; solutions made just to calm down less expert users to &quot;highly-strong&quot; proposal that seem to obstruct the informations flow. In this section we attempt to shortly describe some technologies that are relevant in terms of simplicity of usage and good level of security. (Source: <a href="http://www.safe-commerce.it/" target="_blank">S.A.F.E-Commerce</a> - Veneto Region Program FESR 2000-2006)</PRE>